History
-
Most climatologists attribute the discovery of the greenhouse effect caused by absorption of terrestrial energy by carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” to Irish physicist John Tyndall in 1859 and the following years. According to a story in Climate Change News, “A recently digitized copy of The American Journal of Science and Arts suggests a woman…
-
Did you know that one of the world’s major repositories of climate data is located here in the Southeast in Asheville NC? Of course you did, if you read this blog regularly. The two other main ones are in Hamburg, Germany, and Obninsk, Russia, but there are several other smaller ones as well. Here’s a…
-
For those of you who like sailing and exciting stories, here is a story from Smithsonian magazine I ran across today on the Mobile Bay sailing disaster of 2015, when hurricane-force winds “swept more than 100 boaters into one of the worst sailing disasters in modern American history.” Surprisingly, it is a story I don’t…
-
Two paleoclimatologists at the University of North Carolina have found a way to track a storm—or, at least, track the average of all storms across the season—325 years in the past, according to an article in the latest The Atlantic magazine. The scientists used tree ring data from ponderosa pines in the Pacific Northwest to…
-
Those of you who are older (myself included) may remember Hurricane Agnes, who blew through central Georgia in June 1972, causing immense flooding and leading to the death of 122 people, including nine in Florida from severe thunderstorms associated with the storm. Agnes was one of the most prolific rain-producing storms on record in the…
-
KQED Science had an interesting article this week about how historical paintings from the past can shed light on the amount of pollutants (both natural pollutants like volcanic particulates and human-injected pollutants from industry and transportation) in the atmosphere and how they change the way the sky looks. I’ve talked about this in the past,…
-
According to the History Channel, “on this day in 1752, Benjamin Franklin flies a kite during a thunderstorm and collects a charge in a Leyden jar when the kite is struck by lightning, enabling him to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. Franklin became interested in electricity in the mid-1740s, a time when much was…